In our contemporary culture there is a wide-spread belief that many, if not all, apparent realities are only social constructs and therefore subject to change. It claims there is no absolute truth. Treating all realities as social constructs leads to treating moral law and ethics as nothing more than social quantification. Freedom comes to mean nothing more than the absence of any control. Liberty is reduced to resentment against any kind of limit on behavior.
Whatever culture surrounds us we cannot escape its influence. As a result we can feel insecure about what is to be held as stable and true. It is disconcerting to witness the questioning of many of the solid, stable things we once knew. We might ask whether or not there is anything left that has not been challenged. The challenges can come even from per-sons who are at least nominally Catholic and who present themselves as theologians.
Fr. Thomas Stransky offered a good description of the confusion that reigned following Vatican II. “For a bewildering period after Vatican II it became fashionable not to know, to compare the complacencies of certitude with the sincerity of being inarticulate. Groping was replacing definition. True discipleship meant stuttering doubts, as if not the Word but the Ultimate Question mark had pitched his tent among us.”
None of us have or are we likely to have all the answers. We must start by being humble seekers. Roman Guardini reminds us there are many questions which exist not to be solved, but to be borne, because they are expressions of the preliminary forms of our human existence and its inherent contradictions.
The limitation of our intellectual capacity on the one hand and the complexity of reality on the other means we can never arrive at an exhaustive grasp of the truth. That seems simple and obvious. It is possible, however, to fall victim to various confusions in our attempts to grasp the great truths.
How, then, do we come to truth? Our Christian faith gives us a confidence in the ability of the human intellect to discover truth. Our faith also tells us God has deigned to reveal the most important truths to us in his word (the Bible) and in his Word made flesh. We further believe that those revealed truths are handed on to us by tradition and are taught and safeguarded by the Magisterium (the teaching authority of the Church).